You want to know about Dana Hunter, then, do you? I'm a science blogger, SF writer, compleat geology addict, Gnu Atheist, and owner of a - excuse me, owned by a homicidal felid. I'm the author of Really Terrible Bible Stories vol. I: Genesis. I loves me some Doctor Who and Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. Sums me up. I'm a Midwest-born Southwesterner transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, which should explain some personality quirks, the tendency to sprinkle Spanish around, and why I'll subject you to some real jawbreakers in the place names department. I'm delighted to be your cantinera! Join me for una tequila. And feel free to follow @dhunterauthor on Twitter. Salud!

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EVENTS

So far, Dragon has passed every test I’ve set for it. It’s still going to take some getting used to, but it works much better than I expected. I’m especially impressed with its performance on difficult words. I expected to have to train it for days before would be able to recognize science terms, but so far it’s done very well. Once I get used to speaking punctuation aloud, I should be able to run around the house dictating while doing other things. This will be a remarkable boost to productivity, and my wrists won’t feel a thing. Huzzah!

Whoever came up with this is a genius. Or several geniuses. I’m sure it was more than one person.

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Some of the developers at Google apparently have a very limited experience with online life. The geniuses who designed Hangouts created no way to boot disruptive people out, perhaps thinking that since everybody’s supposed to use their real names, they’ll all behave like perfect angels.

But they don’t. People with apparent “real names” have started crashing Hangouts, acting like complete morons, making it impossible for the people who were there for discussion to have one.

Additionally, they’re “report this person” feature does not include an option for “because they’re a piece of shit with nothing better to do than fuck with random people.” They need to at least modify it so you can add an explanation as to why you’re reporting someone. And to avoid malicious reporting, they need to have a robust review in place – something I seriously doubt they’ve got now, based on their deficiencies in other areas.

So much for that vaunted “real name” policy keeping the rabble out. And if they try to give us that “but we’re now supporting ‘nyms, so of course there will be icky people!” shit, just remember: they aren’t yet. The names of the people who busted in and made fools of themselves during Ron’s Geology Office Hours had names that appeared real. They proudly displayed photos. A “real name” policy does nothing to police the populace. Giving people the tools to block noxious numbskulls in real time and report them adequately, with proper safeguards in place, is the only thing that will work.

We’ll see if Google ever figures that out. If not, Hangouts will quickly cease to be of use to anyone who’s interested in actually hanging out rather than making mayhem, and there will be one less reason to use G+.

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Some of you have contacted me via the blog or email regarding technical difficulties. See? This is why you should follow me on Twitter: you’d know what’s going on, in real time!

But I know not all of you have time for Twitter, and you missed Ed’s notice, so here’s the deal: we had server issues. We’re fixing those. Our tech guy’s working himself into a lather (everybody say “Thank you!”) to get the site running better, and very soon we’ll have a snazzy new server that should take care of many of the problems you’ve had loading the site. He’s also working on some issues with commenting that have been brought to my attention – continue to let me know about those through Twitter or Facebook or even email, yahoo’s got me down as dhunterauthor.

We know it’s not perfect here yet. We’re working on that. Well, more specifically, they’re working and I’m egging them on.

This is a young site, and there are going to be a few rough spots. I know it’s going to be frustrating. When you’re experiencing issues, so am I, and believe me, when you have a tiny window of time to write in and can’t do it because the site’s down, it hurts. But it’s gonna get better. Stick with us, and we’ll get there.

Thanks for your patience!

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Although, to be honest, I’m a PC girl. Have been since the personal computer fell within a middle-class price range. And there was a while there when I hated Steve Jobs, because he made my job so much harder. All right, I didn’t hate him, I hated his phone. iPhone users had an almost-religious fervor and would never ever in a billion trillion years admit that their phone might have a problem rather than the network. Thing could be shattered in a thousand pieces after being dropped on a tile floor, and they’d still claim the network did it.

And that bloody touchscreen and I couldn’t communicate. It didn’t like my cold fingers. My friends would thrust their pride-and-joy my hands, and it would just sit there, inert, or take me places I didn’t want to go. Bloody stupid device.

But that was all before the iPhone 3gs, which got so very much right, and which I got along with.

Imagine you’re walking down the street and you say out loud, “Down with the government!” For all non-megastars, the vast majority of people within earshot will have no idea who you are. They won’t have access to your employment history or your social network or any of the other things that a Google search allows one to find. The only information they really have about you is your physical characteristics and mode of dress, which are data-rich but which cannot be directly or easily connected to your actual identity. In my case, bystanders would know that a 5’9″, 165 pound probably Caucasian male with half a beard said, “Down with the government!” Neither my speech or the context in which it occurred is preserved. And as soon as I leave the immediate vicinity, no one can definitively prove that I said, “Down with the government!”

In your head, adjust the settings for this thought experiment (you say it at work or your hometown or on television) or what you say (something racist, something intensely valuable, something criminal) or who you are (child, celebrity, politician) or who is listening (reporters, no one, coworkers, family). What I think you’ll find is that we have different expectations for the publicness and persistence of a statement depending on a variety of factors. There is a continuum of publicness and persistence and anonymity. But in real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don’t become part of the searchable Internet.

Online, Google and Facebook require an inversion of this assumed norm. Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can’t just say, “Down with the government,” with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you. But the information is still being recorded, presumably in perpetuity. That means that if a government or human resources researcher or plain old enemy wants to get a hold of it, it is possible. [emphasis in original]

And you know something, that’s true. I mean, we already knew about the whole people-could-search-you-out stuff; that’s one of the main reasons why we ‘nym advocates advocate ‘nyms in the first place. But this really brings home the point, better than anything else, that what Google and Facebook want us to do is something we don’t do even in real life.

Ah, yes. Very civil. A shining example of the kind of respectful discourse one can expect when everybody knows everybody’s real name, isn’t it?

We’ve seen your arguments as to why real names are necessary, and Facebook has disproved very nearly all of them. Those Facebook hasn’t managed to provide demonstrations against are taken care of at the previous link. And I’m sorry, but your civility argument was so full of holes it could be used to drain spaghetti to begin with, and since then several people have hit it repeatedly with birdshot. I think there are some scraps left there somewhere, but they can’t be scraped together into anything usable now. Real names do nothing to rescue teh intertoobz from civility problems. People are too adept at being rat bastards for anything like a real name policy to stop them.

Ah, you say, but there will be consequences! Because, y’know, bosses and stuff will know who’s saying what, and they’ll get caught, and everything will be happiness and rainbows.

That may be true in a subset of cases. A few people may have to pay a real price for bad behavior. Lovely. Meanwhile, the bad behavior continues apace, because the chance of suffering consequences is so damned remote. And folks like, oh, lessee, Bob “Shoot to Kill” O’Connell and Joe “12 Gauge” Martinez are free to continue spewing their hate and death threats on real name forums like Facebook and Google+ while people like Bug Girl and GrrlScientist are shut out.

You don’t solve the civility problem with real names. Real names won’t stop a soul from frothing at the mouth. Even if everybody signing up for Google+ had to provide a photo I.D., therefore guaranteeing they have to use their really-real names, the civility problem would continue apace. Look at Congress.

I hate to tell you this, but the civility problem will never be solved. There will always be a subset of rotten jerks in any given population. The band-aid of a real names policy does nothing but give you the illusion things will be hunky-dory.

You mitigate it by having tools in place for folks to flag bad behavior. You mitigate it by having policies in place that deal with that bad behavior no matter what name it’s coming from. That’s what Google can do: provide some community guidelines (while keeping in mind that free speech shouldn’t always be nicey-nice speech), and provide tools for people to report bad behavior.

You yourself are going to have to take some responsibility beyond “real names!” to solve the civility problem. You’ll have to flag people who are being wildly inappropriate (and not just because you don’t agree with them, or don’t like their way of putting things, but truly bad, outrageous, nasty behavior). You’ll have to block those folks who make you feel icky inside, whose actions haven’t reached the level of a flag but are still not something you’ll allow in your online parlor. Speak out against behavior you find reprehensible. And step in and ask folks to behave better when comment threads on your stream get heated.

Whose fault is it if a place is full of assholes? That’s right. Uncomfortable but true.

So please, stop bleating about how real names are required to make the web a better place, and go about doing things that will actually make it a better place. Plenty of ‘nyms will be happy to join you in those efforts.

Google+ is going to have to deal with a few facts or shrink dramatically.

A ‘nym is not an unknown. Names are easy to fake. Reputations are not. Over the months and years, pseudonymous folk build up a reputation, and that reputation follows the ‘nym. So let’s not pretend that a pseudonym is the same as anonymous. Some people still get confused about that – apparently, Google+ is, too, and it’s pathetic at this late stage in the game. Allowing people to use their pseudonyms will not throw open the gates to barbarians and trolls. Disallowing ‘nyms won’t prevent people from being assclowns. What Google is doing is about as sensible as banning all Muslims from airports because the vast majority of people who hijack planes are Muslim. You harm a lot of very good people for very little gain. There are better ways of guarding against undesired behaviors. Such as, banning the people who actually engage in those behaviors, regardless of whether they use their real names or not.

Google seems to have this idea that people only use a ‘nym because they’re up to no good. That’s ridiculous. There are plenty of excellent reasons why someone wouldn’t want to go by their real name. I chose a pseudonym a long time ago (ye gods, nearly twenty years, how time flies), not because I wanted to hide my real self but because my legal name isn’t one I want on the cover of my books. Grow up with a last name associated with a very kitschy retailer, deal with the endless no-longer-funny jokes, and on top of that have a character filch your first name, and before long, you’re having nightmares about doing very Not Nice things to fans who unwitting tell you the Not Funny Joke for the billionth-and-eleventy-first time. In the interests of public relations, I have to be a ‘nym.

But there are deeper reasons. Much, much deeper.

I do not want my identity stolen. I do not want to be stalked. I do not want current or future employers deciding my liberal tendencies or my atheism or whatever else makes me suddenly unemployable, despite an exemplary track record. I do not want my rapist able to locate me simply by searching my name. Those, it seems, are reasons enough not to operate online under my legal name. Besides, my legal name weirds me out, now. I hear it and it sounds wrong. I’m Dana Hunter, online and off (except at the office). That’s me. Not this stranger on my driver’s license.

There are ‘nyms out there who have even better reasons. ‘Nyms who risk death by being who they are, and would potentially be tracked down and killed if they went by their real names – Muslims who deconvert, for instance, or women escaping abusive former spouses. There are ‘nyms who would be ostracized were certain things about them known: that they’re LGBTQ, or atheists. There are ‘nyms who would lose their jobs for saying what they do: whistleblowers, or simply people who have a lot to share but whose companies don’t want them to discuss anything even tangentially related to their employment in public. All of these ‘nyms have something of interest to say, something of value to contribute, and the intertoobz would be a far poorer place were they silenced. Google+ certainly will be a sanitized wasteland if they’re all exiled from it.

And how does it possibly make sense to force ‘nyms to use their real names, even if they’re able? We don’t know who the fuck John B. Smith is. We don’t care. We know a ‘nym, and a ‘nym is who we’re looking for when we go to add that beloved person to our circles. And how do you, Google, know that John B. Smith is the name behind the ‘nym? Because it’s a “real” name, not something even the most drug-addled hippie parent would have named a child? How do you know that real-sounding name wasn’t just cobbled together from a few random entries in a phone book? We don’t present proof of identity when we sign up. Google doesn’t have Dana Hunter’s driver’s license or birth certificate on file. (Should they ever ask, though, I can point them to a rather large number of people in both my online and offline worlds who’d know who Dana Hunter is and could easily pick me out of a crowd. Even my parents know me by my ‘nym.)

The solution to whatever it is Google’s hoping to prevent by banning ‘nyms – whether it’s sock puppetry or trolling or general asshattery – isn’t the nuclear option of banning everybody with an implausible name (including Chinese ones). Just witness the security procedures that put innocent kiddies on no-fly lists only to let a terrorist named Richard Reid on board, no questions asked despite the bomb in his shoe, to see how effective such tactics are. Targeted tools that enforce consequences for actual bad behavior make better sense, don’t ensnare the innocent quite so often, and ensure actual results. That’s much more useful to a community.

Google+ is new, and there are bound to be growing pains. The real test is to see how they respond to their mistakes. If they’re smart, they’ll fix their policy and let the poor exiled ‘nyms back in with a swift apology.

If not, my profile may not be long for Google+, whether they cotton to the fact I’m a ‘nym or not. I don’t think I’d want to be part of an environment that’s unremittingly hostile to my Bug Girl and DrugMonkey friends.

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Brian Romans wanted screenshots, and screenshots he shall have. You’re all welcome to sneak a look. And give thanks to Ron Schott for making it possible – he kindly sent me an invite.

Google+ is, so far, the only social media site I haven’t had to be dragged on to kicking and screaming. All of the others – MySpace, Facebook and Twitter – struck me as a gargantuan time suck with little benefit. Friends of mine (I call them friends) ganged up and created a MySpace profile for me, so it was get my ass on there or have them make up outrageous shit about me until I did. Can’t remember why I joined Facebook, honestly – I think it was for some cause or other. And Twitter is Erik Klemetti’s fault – when he left ScienceBlogs, he was only going to be on Twitter for a while, so I grumbled and I groaned but I jumped on to follow him because I couldn’t be without Eruptions. Little did I know that Twitter would change my life for the best. Thank you, Erik!

I think it’s that last experience that made me want to be in on Google+ from the beginning. That, and the promise that I could organize the people I associated with into circles. This is genius. I don’t have to drink from a firehose – if I want to catch up on my geos, I can choose my geo circle; if I’m feeling friendly, I can view friends only, and so forth. Here’s what my home page looks like:

You notice the selections off to the left, there? That’s right – I can change who shows up in my stream with a click of a button. It’s teh awesome. I love it.

Also not the “Hangouts” button to the right. Hangouts are genius. Ron was kind enough to have me over for a chat earlier. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get audio to work, and I still haven’t figured out why it won’t save my settings, but I’m sure those issues will get sorted. We still managed a fine chat, and you know what this means: we can all jump into a hangout, show each other rocks, and jibber-jabber. If they come up with a recording feature, it’ll become a hugely valuable tool for us.

Posting is a breeze, and I love the look I get when I link blog posts:

It snatches a picture and a few lines from the post for me. Completely easy and absolutely lovely.

Adding people to circles, creating new circles, and managing them is simplicity itself. You’ll see when you get there. It’s pretty much just drag-and-drop, and there’s all sorts of ways to add people without having to go through a lot of effort.

That’s the thing about Google+: even in these early days, it’s pretty much effortless. I don’t know how cluttered and weird it might get later, but right now it’s relaxing, refreshing, and actually useful. It seems like I’ll be able to connect with a huge number of very outstanding people here, and it allows a lot more depth and scope than Twitter.

Not that I’ll ever stop loving Twitter. The two seem to compliment each other quite well so far, and let’s face facts: I’m a total Twitter addict. But I’m happy there’s finally a social networking site that allows me to do so much more without the various irritations of Facebook.

If you’re already on Google+, come find me. If not, hop on once they’ve opened the place up and come find me then. I want my circles filled with awesome, and you, my darlings, are the very definition of awesome.

My stepmother, who recently sold me out for one o’ them new-fangled handheld-computers-that-can-sometimes-make-phone-calls contraptions, has also been extolling the virtues of her Kindle. I think she’s trying to drag me kicking and screaming into the electronics age. I’ve dug in my heels. Yes, I swore I would never ever download music, and didn’t so much break that vow as blow it to smithereens. But books are a different matter. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of persuasion to wean me off of good old-fashioned dead-tree books.

You can’t dog-ear pages on an e-book reader. And no, electronically bookmarking bits isn’t the same.

You can’t tell which bits you’ve read over and over by letting a book fall open on a reader.

Unless you’ve got the money for dozens of Kindles, you can’t sit in the middle of a pile of books while doing research.

Kindles don’t insulate your walls.

It’s harder for visitors to browse your shelves when your library’s on a Kindle.

Books are all one size on a reader, rather than a variety of shapes and sizes.

You can’t trade in your used books.

If the power goes out and your batteries are low, you can still read a paper book by candlelight.

And there are plenty of other reasons, all coming down to the fact that I like having actual, physical, individual, substantive texts around me.

Now, there are things that work better electronically. George is right: technical manuals and encyclopedias are perfect candidates for electronic media. So are things like phone books, reference books, anything that depends on being up-to-the-minute and is obsolete nearly as soon as you get a copy. Since I got plugged into the magic of the intertoobz, haven’t needed those books of facts, atlases, or other things like that. This leaves me more cold hard cash for the kind of books that keep for years, that deserve a life of their own and an individual place on my shelves.

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There was only one quiet interval at work today wherein I could check my email, and there was this cry for help from my stepmother. She’s got a new cell phone.

What new cell phone? I fired back while my stomach made like iron and nickel on the molten earth and sank.

I will not mention the make and model, as that would betray where I work, and I do not want to tempt my corporate overlords into separating me from my only means of acquiring kitty kibble. Needless to say, she’d chosen the one phone that is the bane of my existence (and the source of considerable job security). It’s one of the most complicated phones we carry. And this purchased by a woman who, a few years ago, swore she’d never own a cell phone ever in her life, and who only last year was flummoxed by a pre-paid flip phone.

So I spent my lunch hour muttering “I can’t fucking believe you bought that fucking phone!” whilst helping her bring it to the point where it could potentially make and receive calls. I feel betrayed. I expected better of my family. Next thing I know, my dear old Dad will be calling me up wanting help with the same model, or worse. At least I know the ins-and-outs of the thing. And at least they won’t blame me for its quirks.

Still.

At least I have solid proof, should I ever need it, that my bitching about this phone in my private life carries no weight with anyone whatsoever. Even my own family doesn’t listen to me. So the company needn’t worry about my impact upon its sales…